1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a graphics rendering technique using polygon data and vector data.
2. Background Art
Graphical user interfaces (hereinafter, “GUIs”) originally developed for OS of personal computers have been now installed on digital TVs, portable telephones, and the like. There have been widespread GUIs.
Also, in recent years, there have become available many GUIs for displaying 3D images (hereinafter, “3D-GUIs”), as disclosed in Patent Literature 1.
As shown in FIG. 34, a 3D-GUI disclosed in the Patent Literature 1 displays, on a screen, a cubic CB and a menu screen (also referred to as “window” or “work space”) MENU, which is composed of an icon IC1, a character IC2, and so on, that is pasted onto each surface (polygon) PG of the cubic CB.
As shown in FIG. 35, there is an expectancy for a 3D-GUI that displays a plurality of cubes CB1, CB2, . . . , CB7, and zooms in the cube CB1 that is selected by a user for display, and zooms out the other remaining cubes CB2, CB3, . . . , CB7 around the cube CB1 for display.
By the way, as this type of 3D-GUI, it is general to use a graphics rendering apparatus that stores a character font of a menu screen as vector data (outline data).
This type of graphics rendering apparatus, which has been conventionally used, performs processing roughly in accordance with a flow shown below.
Firstly, a character texture having an appropriate size is generated based on vector data (PG1 shown in FIG. 36). Next, the character texture is scaled in accordance with the size of a polygon PG (PG2 or PG3 shown in FIG. 36). Then, the scaled character texture is mapped onto the polygon PG.